I’m the Program Manager for SMART drivers and SMART Ink. Thanks for taking an interest inour products. SMART Notebook itself supports inking natively and will work with any interactive product that supports touch or pen input. Many other applications, such as Microsoft Office, support inking natively as well. SMART Ink is part of our driver package, and not a feature of SMART Notebook. We include the drivers package with SMART Notebook installs as a convenience. SMART Ink is a feature of SMART interactive hardware (interactive flat panels, interactive whiteboards, Podium) that allows users to ink on top of applications that don’t otherwise support inking.
Floating Tools was part of the drivers package, but itself was not part of SMART Ink. Since the Floating Tools toolbar always showed shortcuts to pens, it caused confusion among users who saw them and didn’t understand why they could select pens, but not write on SMART Ink overlays when they weren’t connected to a SMART product. One of the design goals of SMART Ink 3.x was to make inking interactions on the panel more natural, so SMART Ink evolved to only display its new toolbars when connected to a SMART interactive product. SMART interactive products that include active pen trays will take this even further and only display the toolbars when you’ve picked up a pen from the pen tray. We want the Ink toolbars to be there when you need them and gone when you don't.
Floating Tools utility outside of pen shortcuts as a launchpad for features like Screen Shade or Spotlight diminished over the years as Windows and Mac introduced the ability to pin application shortcuts to thetaskbar and dock. In light of these OS features, which we encourage teachers to use, it made sense for us to return that screen real estate to users. Floating Tools has been retired starting with the SMART drivers 12.3 release, which was bundled with Notebook 15.1. Drivers and SMART Ink are available standalone at no cost to everyone with a SMART interactive hardware product and installing the new package for Windows or Mac will remove Floating Tools and upgrade them to the new SMART Ink experience. Visit http://smarttech.com/software for the links to install Drivers 12.3 with Ink 3.1.
To sum up, we’ve upgraded the SMART Ink experience to provide users of our interactive hardware a more natural, more intuitive experience. Along the way, we’ve also tried to make things more predictable for everyone by removing Floating Tools which didn’t provide users with a consistent experience.
Take care,
-Joe
